Advertising on Etsy Doesn’t Help Your Brand

It’s a rare day for me to say anything negative about Etsy. I love Etsy and I love the creative culture it represents.

But I also love good business. I love the entrepreneurial spirit in each one of you who sells your creativity online every day {or at least tries to}!

So at the risk of sounding negative, I want to point out something that I totally didn’t think about in the early excitement of Etsy Search Ads. {mine did not perform well, btw}

Long time EverythingEtsy advertiser Wild Apple Designs makes great use of one of the world's biggest brands!

Advertising on Etsy Doesn’t Help Your Brand

If you’re paying for ad impressions, then you should be building your brand. In fact, brand building is the whole “value proposition” of most CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) ad networks. It’s that repeated exposure to a brand that burns an impression in the mind of viewers.

Think about it. Can’t you think of brands you’ve seen over and over again even though you’ve never even clicked on their ads? What about right here on our blog? Some of our advertisers have been here for years and you may have seen them thousands of times on this site alone.

Fat Quarter Shop’s Ads have been seen more than two million times on this site alone.

It’s more than just one of the things you do. It’s the KEY point of a long-term success online.

Without a brand, you can forget ever having a shop on your own domain that actually gets sales. Without a brand, you can only maintain your business. You can’t build it into something magnificent.

All Other Online Advertising Helps Your Brand

I hate to say it, but I can’t think of another type of online ad that doesn’t give you branding even when you don’t get a click.

Even Google AdWords ads, which you don’t even pay for unless you get a click, gives you free brand building every time that ad is read or even subsconciously scanned by human eyes. {In addition to giving you a little SEO boost you can bet.}

Blog Ads, like the ones you see here on this site, are excellent for brand building because blogs have loyal readers. People come back over and over again and each time they do, they see your ad. Even if just a glance. They know your logo. They know your colors.

You get a chance to stand out. A lot! If you had an ad on this site last month, it would have appeared about 340,000 times! Even our most expensive ad unit, the 200×200 at the top of the sidebar is $100 per month. So that’s a cost of less than .30 per 1000 impressions for a 200×200 banner ad!

We should raise our prices but we don’t. You know why? We care about you and we can’t afford to lose advertisers. Which brings up my next point.

Blog Ads Support Bloggers – Bloggers Support Advertisers

Some of the absolute best brand building you can get is a feature on a well read blog. There are so many blogs out there that are run by individuals who are busting their tail to make a living from blogging. NOT an easy thing to do.

When you buy an ad from them, you get real gratitude. You get individuals who are happy, like really happy when they get an email from PayPal saying you bought an ad. I know that there have been times when ad sales were literally an answered prayer.

That kind of impact in a person’s life leads to gratitude. They truly and personally appreciate your business and are usually eager for a chance to tell their readers about you, your shop, and your brand.

Usually with a huge picture and lots of smiley faces.

Etsy Search Ads Should Be Totally Financially Driven

This is very simple. If you are making worthwhile profit from the ads, do them. If not, don’t.

When the Etsy Search Ads started, I eagerly ran ads in three of my shops. I spent $27.00 and I got one sale for $29.00 directly from the ads. The item I sold had a cost, of course, so I lost money.

If I had been building my brand, maybe I would have kept it up. But I saw no benefit, so I cancelled my ads completely.

I’ll stick with advertising that builds my brand. What about you?

~Kim

If you thought the 30 cents for 1000 impressions was a good deal, how would you feel about 3 cents? Our quarterly ad sale is coming up this week. A limited number of shops will be included in our Etsy Shop only box on the lower right for only $30.00 for three months! See the email sign-up form on our advertising page to be notified.

Comments

Agreed. However, you can’t discount new customer acquisition from the etsy search ads. Say that customer that you got from the ad told 2 others via word of mouth. It may not back out $ wise on the front end, but the lifetime value of that customer may be higher that you previously thought if said customer was really pleased with the transaction.

I wish I had read this BEFORE I paid for Etsy Search Ads!! Got absolutely nothing out of it, thought it was just me until I read this and asked around. You are the only one I know who even got a sale!!

I agreee 1000%. I did not get one sale from the search ads. However, for the last several months I have been paying twice as much on Etsy and my sales have dropped 85%. Very disappointed in their new system. And I have tried to send the letters and phone calls, which they totally ignore. I wish that more people would speak up and try to get them to go back to how it was. I think it is more fair when you get what you invest.

I thought this was just me. What I’ve discovered is that I’m getting about the same amount of traffic that I did before the ESA’s….I’m just poorer now. People are viewing my ads, they just aren’t viewing my shop. Thank you for giving an honest opinion on this. As someone with a small shop, this was one more way to feel intimidated by larger shops. I don’t have a ton of money to invest in ESA’s. But now that I know its not just me, I can breathe a sigh of relief. I’m gonna take your advice and invest in blog advertising. That seems more like a win/win for everyone involved.

I am so with you guys. My traffic and sales and halted since the search ads. I’m very unhappy and hope they switch it soon. How do they decide if something is more relevant bs. Something’s else that is the same. I wish this had been more thought out and well planned. Please change soon easy! Thanks for sharing Kim. Seems like we are all in the same boat with the ads.

I’ve been experimenting with Search Ads since they came out, but my stats show that they are pretty worthless! My gut told me that it was a waste of money. Thanks for articulating what my gut was saying!

I didn’t even consider buying the ads. My biggest gripe with Etsy is THEIR lack of advertising. Maybe I run in the wrong circles, but I am so tired of explaining Etsy to people who have never heard of it. Why don’t they spend more of the money they make from us on advertising, instead of us spending more money that we’re not getting back in sales. Right now, I have cut out all but essential spending on my art unless and until I get enough sales to justify the cost. I’m focusing on every free bit of advertising and networking I can do.

I have a bit of a strange scenario. My sales really boomed in August and September(usually my slow months). Two months before, I found you guys here, and really worked on my SEO with my titles and tags. I thought that was making the difference. Then, Etsy made their search change, and I checked through on searches, and still found my listings on about every page. I figured I had accomplished the relevancy. Then, I went on vacation for a couple weeks, and now I am on maybe page 8 in a sea of competition. I renewed 3 in a row a couple times to see what that would do, and I bought some search ads. So far nothing. I’m paying about .14 cents per view according to my stats. At $5/week, I’m spending less than when I used to renew. BUT, when you have competition, you have to stand out, and I do with my photos and style. It’s just that they will never notice unless I’m on page 1 or 2. Does it just take time to get back after vacation?

I have had a search ad since the beginning. It has now been 12 days and my views have not increased and I only had one sale. At this point I might break even. I will not continue with the search ad after this week, it just hasn’t been worth the money. The best money I had spent was for relisting before they switched the searches. I continued relisting for a couple of weeks and realized my views were still declining so I quit spending my money on them. My views have not decreased any more since. I just wish they would go back to to the other way for searches.

My sales were increasing every month until August and things for me have nosedived dramatically since they changed the search. I spent $22 on search ads and had one sale that just covered my ad cost. Etsy is my full time job but now… I’m really worried.

I first tried the search ads at the cheapest amount of $5. I had good results- however, I did pick one section of my shop to feature, rather than the whole thing. I also made specific changes to my key words and re-listed items that the ad’s were geared toward. Because of the good results I got, I decided to change my search ads to the whole shop, and upgraded to the $10 amount. Again, I’ve had good results with the ads. I think they work far better than the other promotional tools they have, such as the showcase or coupon codes. Sorry to hear not everyone is having success with them.

Kelly-I understand the concern. My sales were increasing so well that in July I quit my full time job to be able to do Etsy full time since I could no longer keep up with both. Then in August they switched the searchs and I have been holding my ground with not to much loss but it definately is not increasing any like it was. I wish I would have known they were going to change things before I quit my job.

I bought the ads for the first week and then renewed them because I definitely had increased traffic to my shop. We’re not talking thousands of views but a lot more then I would have had without the ads. I also saw increased traffic coming from other than the ads too, and had 3 sales from those. No sales came from the ads but at the moment I’m happy with some extra exposure. For me $5 a week is OK, I was spending more than that on relistng before.

What I did was for the first 2 days of ads I watched the keywords to see which section of my shop was being hit the most. Then I changed it to feature that one section and played with my keywords. My sale was on the last day and from that section.

I did get some additional sales this month, but I’m almost certain it had nothing to do with search ads. I did purchase one ad just to see what would happen. But I also reinstated google adwords and paid someone to do some more SEO for me. After I instated the shop ads I had 2 days of very high views (for me) and then it dropped off. I’m really torn as to what I should do, because if I don’t pay for the ads I *could* be losing sales, but even with shop stats it’s really difficult to tell exactly where those sales came from.

well i will say i got 4 sales in september which is the most i’ve gotten in one month since i opened my store. i ran an ad and got no sales but, as a relatively undiscovered shop i was happy to get 2000 impressions.

Glad I haven’t spent the money on them–very glad. I’m worried, though, that the search experience is worse for potential buyers now, since new listings are no longer in the top four slots. I always enjoyed seeing the new listings, but the search ads, not so much.

Etsy Ads proved disappointing for me as well. I paid for a week and received barely any views and no sales.
Sales have been at a complete stand still for me since Etsy made all the recent changes. This has been a complete change for me, after being pleasantly steady all year. The fall and holidays is normally my busiest sales time, so this has been very scary for me. Especially since this is my only source of income right now. Needless to say, I am STRESSED.

This is good to know! I hesitated buying an Etsy ad until I could see exactly how they were working or not working. I’m glad I did. I need to spend every dollar I have very carefully & if I’m getting no results or hear that very few are getting results, then I want to spend my money elsewhere. Thank you for sharing your experience!

Just another point. If you purchase an ad, then try to do searches yourself you will find something very interesting. NO ads appear at the top of the search page. Once in a great while you will do a search that brings ads up.
Being a once time graphic designer and website designer. I can tell you this is because the Etsy search database is not complete and not working at 100% yet.
If Etsy had any respect at all for their artists and all the artist have done to make etsy what it is, they would reimburse the search ad money to everyone.
Etsy is just a hub. The artist are the true website. The artist have made this hub valuable. And the artist are the ones who have explained to everyone they meet what “etsy” is.
The only way to get etsy to make a change is for the artist to pull together. However, we know most people operate on fear. If you want to see action, NOBODY PAY their etsy bill this month. Fear of them closing an account that isn’t making any sales! If enough people did this (if everyone did this), you would see them listen.
Etsy is run by many people under 30 years old. Which is fabulous, because they have fresh ideas and energy. Also, bad because they don’t have life and business experience.
I tried emailing and left a phone message to discuss my search ads, and nobody returned either. They are young and don’t want to listen to their “parents” so to speak. LOL
Imagine this though: 10,000 Etsy Artists don’t pay this month. An average of $200 bill. Guess what the boys won’t be receiving as an allowance this month??? $2,000,000
If $2 million doesn’t show up in their account, do you think they will listen??

Tim here: Kim and I were talking about all the comments (we really appreciate getting so much input from you!). One thing we realized is that the post sounds like we don’t value the one new client Kim got from her sale. We do!

No doubt about it, the “lifetime value” of a customer is important. The question to consider though, is this:

“If we spent $27.00 in other types of advertising, what is the chance of getting one sale?” It’s decent. We probably would get at least one. So by advertising on other channels we would still get the one new customer and maybe more. But we will definitely get to build our brand because our name, logo, and image ad will be repeatedly displayed. Advertising is funny… the longer you run it the more effective it seems to be because viewers have begun to trust us before ever clicking simply because they’ve “seen us around awhile”. (It is good to change ad graphics while maintaining some continuity such as the logo and general color scheme)

We’ll be talking more about this subject in the coming weeks. It’s interesting to watch.

One other thing we’ve talked about is that it’s not right in our opinion to too closely connect “Etsy” with “Etsy Search Ads” – just because the ads aren’t working great doesn’t mean that Etsy isn’t still the absolute best place to sell your handmade stuff online, especially if you’re just getting going. All of the other things we’ve said about why Etsy is the best venue still apply. We just don’t see the ads working great for sellers and we know the importance of building a brand.

Great post with a lot of important points, especially on good ways to build your brand.
My own experience with Search Ads is similiar to Kim’s….I made a sale or two, received a good number of views, and had items “favorited”, but am not renewing them for the time being as I didn’t make as much as I put in.
Knowing that, though, and reading through some comments on this post, I want to mention a couple of points that sellers need to remember before they give up on Search Ads altogether…
1)I do not believe that Etsy is just trying to make a fast buck off all of us and I DO believe that Etsy thinks Search Ads are/will be profitable. Why? They make it very, very easy (via shop stats) to see exactly how well your Search Ads are doing. They easily could’ve just combined Search Ad views with “regular” shop views without letting Sellers pinpoint exactly where their sales are coming from. I think they did this because they believe Ads are profitable, and want sellers to see this as well.
2) Just like in blog advertising, it is Etsy’s job to get you views, but it is your job as shop owner to convert those views to sales! If you are receiving lots of views, but no sales, this may be a good time to review your photos, pricing, descriptions, etc. Again, this goes for all advertising-an ad will get you views, YOU need to translate those into sales:)
3) Just like with blog advertising, sales from Search Ads may come further down the road…even if a sale wasn’t immediately made with an Ad, a buyer who favorited your shop/item, may be back to buy! Only time will tell:)
Thanks for the great post, Kim & Tim!!
xo

I’m pleased to know it was not just me and my (nursery/kids art prints) shop – I have tried the etsy search ads a couple of times now and have have not had any substantial response to them. No sales and barely any views generated by them so will have to experiment with other methods for now.

[…] wrote a post about one of the things we didn’t like, which was that you didn’t get brand building for your ad money. With other types of advertising like blog ads or Google Ads, you get some brand building even when […]

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